Rwanda was once Africa’s most Catholic nation, until
the Church was deeply implicated in the genocide of
1994. Now the Muslim population has more than
doubled. M. D. ABDULLAH, a Crescent reader in
Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania, sent this report.

Rwanda, once Africa’s most Catholic nation, now has
twice as many Muslims as it had before the genocide
in 1994. It is now common to see villagers with
caps, scarves and copies of the Qur’an arriving at a
mosque on a rainy Sunday afternoon for a talk
addressed to new converts. There is one topic that
attracts attention in all meetings: jihad.

There is one talk about 6 April 1994, the first day
of the state-sponsored genocide, in which ethnic
Hutu extremists killed more than a million minority
Tutsis and Hutu moderates. "We have our own Jihad,
and that is our war against ignorance between Hutu
and Tutsi. It is our struggle to heal," Saleh
Habimana, the head Mufti of Rwanda, has said; "our
Jihad is to start respecting each other and living
as Rwandans and as Muslims."

Since the genocide, Rwandans have accepted Islam in
huge numbers. Muslims now comprise 14 percent of the
8.2 million of Rwanda, which is twice as many as
before the massacres in 1994. Many converts have
said that they chose Islam because of the role that
some Catholic and Protestant leaders played in the
genocide. Various human-rights groups have
documented several incidents in which Christian
clerics allowed Tutsis to seek refuge in churches,
then surrendered them to Hutu death-squads, as well
as instances of Hutu priests and ministers
encouraging their congregations to kill Tutsis. Four
clergymen are currently facing genocide charges at
the UN-created International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda. Last year in Belgium, the former colonial
ruler of Rwanda, two Rwandan nuns were convicted of
murder for their roles in the massacre of 7,000
Tutsis who had sought protection at a Benedictine
convent.

By contrast, many Muslim leaders and families
protected those who were fleeing or hiding during
the period of crisis, and are now being honored for
it. Many Rwandans believe that it is natural for
Muslims to follow Islam’s strong injunctions against
murder. Others feel that Muslims were not swept into
the Hutus’ campaign of hatred and bloodshed, and
were courageous enough because of their Islam to
support a cause that they felt was honorable.

"I know people in America think Muslims are
terrorists, but for Rwandans they are our freedom
fighters during the genocide," says Jean Pierre
Sagatuhu, 37, a Tutsi who converted to Islam from
Christianity after his father and nine other members
of his family were slaughtered. "I wanted to hide in
a church, but that was the worst place to go.
Instead, a Muslim family took me and saved my life."

The genocide in Rwanda followed the assassination of
Juvenal Habyarimana, then president of Rwanda, on 6
April 1994. For weeks television screens around the
world showed horrific scenes of dead bodies being
piled up. Relief agencies, human-rights campaigners
and even western governments have now accepted that,
between April and July 1994, the military of the old
Hutu-led regime perpetrated a campaign of genocide
against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda, which ended
only when the Tutsi-dominated Rwandese Patriotic
Front (RPF) came to power.

Some people suspect that in reality the Rwandan
bloodshed was not just a genocide driven primarily
by racial or tribal passions. It could well have
been a struggle for political power between the
Hutu-led government and the leadership of RPF; the
leaders of either group could have used the ethnic
issue to their advantage. The animosities between
Hutus and Tutsis were kept alive not by ancient
tradition, but by the very modern practice of
western interference in Rwanda’s affairs.

As was the case in most of Africa, tribal
differences were of limited significance in Rwanda
before the arrival of the colonialists in the
nineteenth century. Many historians acknowledge that
the Belgian conquerors politicized the differences
between peoples in Rwanda by pursuing a policy of
divide and rule and promoting the Tutsis over the
Hutus.

For several years before 1994 the hostility between
the Hutu-run government and the Tutsi exiles in the
RPF was shaped by foreign powers. The French and
Belgian governments, to protect their interests,
supported the Hutu-led regime, while the British and
the Americans tried to increase their influence by
supporting the RPF. From 1986 the RPF was also
openly backed by the Ugandan government, which acted
as an Anglo-American proxy. Rwandans serving in the
Ugandan military received training from the British
at their base at Jinja in Uganda, while the
Americans schooled the RPF leadership. RPF leader
Paul Kagame, for instance, attended the US Army and
Staff College at Leavenworth, Kansas. The US also
supported joint RPF-Ugandan attacks on Rwanda from
1989 onwards.

As American and British relations with Uganda and
the RPF strengthened, hostilities between Uganda and
Rwanda’s government escalated. In 1990 the RPF was
prepared to invade Rwanda with the full knowledge
and approval of British intelligence. Belgium then
withdrew its support for president Juvenal
Habyarimana and allowed the RPF to set up an office
in Brussels. This left France as Habyarimana’s only
western supporter.

French forces left Rwanda in December 1993,
signalling the Habyarimana government’s complete
isolation. A 1,000-strong UN force also arrived in
the same month. These troops escorted an RPF
battalion to the UN’s premises in the Rwandan
capital, Kigali. The UN, at that stage, seemed to be
handing Rwanda over to the RPF. Then came the last
squeeze: Habyarimana was threatened with a UN
pullout and a final RPF offensive if he did not
comply with all the accords. These were the events
that preceded the shooting down of the presidential
plane on 6 April 1994 and the ‘genocide’. On one
side of the polarisation were the Rwandan government
and the national guard (supported by weapons from
South Africa and Egypt). On the other side stood the
RPF, Uganda, Britain, the US, Belgium, the UN and
the World Bank. Caught between the two sides were
the Rwandan people.

Rwanda had been on a knife-edge for more than a year
before the president was assassinated. It was a
country split by war and devastated by the impact of
a Structural Adjustment Program that had been
imposed by the World Bank in 1990. An estimated 85
percent of the people were living below the poverty
line, and a third of all children were malnourished.
In such a situation, with many desperate enough to
do anything for their survival and their children’s,
a western-backed RPF offensive inevitably ignited a
wave of violence. After the massacres, then US
president Bill Clinton announced that he was not
ready to deal with a leadership that permitted its
army to massacre hundreds of thousands of citizens.

Britain and France joined the US and engineered an
arms-embargo in the UN Security Council, after the
genocide, thus denying weapons to the Hutu-led
Rwandese government. However, this embargo was only
applied to the Hutu-led government. The one-sided
embargo in effect allowed the RPF to continue to
receive military supplies, while the Hutu-led
Rwandese government lost all supplies, even those it
had already paid for. A transfer of power took place
eventually, and the rest is history.

Almost a decade after the genocide shook the faith
of this once predominantly Christian country, Islam
has surged. Women in bright tangerine, scarlet and
blue headscarves stroll the bustling streets of the
capital with men in long white tunics and
embroidered caps. Mosques and Islamic schools are
overflowing with students. Today about 14 percent of
the Rwandans consider themselves Muslim, up from
about 7 percent before the genocide. "We are
everywhere," says Sheikh Saleh Habimana, the leader
of Rwanda’s Muslim community.

Western governments feel that the growth of Islam,
high rates of poverty and a "traumatized population"
could make Rwanda the perfect breeding ground for
"Islamic terrorism". But Nish Imiyimana, an imam in
Ruhengeri, about 72 kilometres (45 miles) northwest
of Kigali, contends, "we have enough of our own
problems. We don’t want a bomb dropped on us by
America. We want American NGOs to come and build
hospitals for us instead." Imams across the country
held meetings after September 11 last year to
clarify what it means to be a Muslim.

The Churches in Rwanda are frustrated. Priests all
over the country have asked for advice from Church
leaders in Rome about how to react to the number of
converts to Islam. "The catholic church has a
problem after genocide," said Father Jean Bosco
Ntagugire, who works in Kigali. "We can’t say
‘Christians come back’. We have to hope that happens
when faith builds again." To help make that happen,
the Catholic Church has started to offer young
people sports programmes and camping trips,
Ntagugire said. But Muslims are also reaching out,
even forming women’s groups that provide classes on
childcare and mothering. During a recent women’s
gathering in Kigali, Aisha Uwimbabazi, a 27-year-old
convert, said, "If it weren’t for the Muslims, my
whole family would be dead... I was very, very
thankful for Muslim people during the genocide. I
thought about it and really felt that it was right
to accept Islam." Another woman, Salmah Ingabire,
20, who accepted Islam in 1995 after losing two
brothers in the genocide, said, "We see Muslims as
very kind people. What we saw in the genocide
changed our minds."

Another achievement that has gone to the credit of
Muslims in Rwanda is the reconciliation efforts.
Sheikh Habimana is one of the leaders of the
country’s new interfaith commission, created to
promote acceptance among Hutus and Tutsis who are
still subject to fear and anger. The mosques in
Rwanda are among the few places where reconciliation
genuinely appears to have taken hold. "In the
Islamic faith, Hutu and Tutsi are the same, as Islam
teaches us about brotherhood," said Imam Kayiranga.
Rwanda’s Tutsi have mostly come to Islam seeking
protection and to honour and emulate the Muslims who
saved them, and Hutus have embraced Islam seeking to
leave behind their violent past. "They all felt the
blood in their hands and they embraced Islam to
purify themselves," said Saleh Habimana. The head
Mufti also said that the Muslim community in Rwanda
had a "wonderful opportunity" in the reconciliation
process and "integration of interfaith commission".
He has pointed out that Muslims were not involved in
the violence and bloodletting, partly because of
their tradition of intermarriages between Hutus and
Tutsis.

Long before the call to prayer begins each Friday
for juma’ah, Rwanda’s Muslims crowd into the main
mosque in Kigali’s Nyamirambo neighbourhood, the
overflow spreading prayer rugs on the mosque steps,
over the red earth parking-lot and out of the front
gate. The popular saying that "Africa is the only
continent that is Muslim" may well be soon made true
by the steady growth of Islam in Rwanda and other
parts of Africa.